Essentials of Mannerist Art & Architecture

Mannerist Art and Architecture is not as well known as the Renaissance Art which came before and the Baroque Art which came afterwards, but it is a critical chapter in the development towards Modern Western European Art. In the mid to late sixteenth century, the political, social, and even religious fabric of life in Italy which had been a certainty was unraveling at the seams. Artists stopped looking to first-hand observation and turned instead to the copying, distorting, and surpassing of other great artists' work before them. Mannerism could not have developed in a void without the Renaissance, but the Mannerist painter and architect broke all the rules which the authorities of the Renaissance- Brunelleschi and Alberti, for example- laid down. We see artwork charged with psychological turmoil, designed to provoke an intense emotional reaction in the viewer: uncertainty, disorientation, wonder, awe, and even terror. However, Mannerist Art followed the tastes of elite courts of Europe, and we see a permissiveness extended to its erotic and transgressive forms that the later Baroque Art, intended for mass consumption, would ultimately silence and censure.

The conventional use of the term “Mannerist” or “Mannerism” in the History of Art is indebted to a somewhat convoluted Italian origin. Mannerism is the second time period or recognizable style we have encountered that is indebted to the first art historian, Giorgio Vasari the sixteenth-century court writer for Cosimo I de’ Medici in Florence. The first was the description “Gothic,” which was initially an insulting description of the non-Roman-derived architecture and artistic tastes north of the Alps; now, we know the soaring cathedrals and master-works of stone engineering we saw radiating from Medieval France as the quintessential Gothic style, and no disparagement is intended or understood. In a similar transformation from Vasari’s sometimes-colloquial turns of phrase in his Renaissance Lives of the Artists, we find the treatment of “maniera” and its eventual assimilation into the period and style we associate with Mannerism. When Vasari used maniera, he meant the style or handling of a piece of artwork; the bella maniera, or the beautiful style, he attributed to the “constellation of three,” the Greats of the High Renaissance: Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. However, in retrospect, what art historians have recognized to be the genius of these three masters of the High Renaissance was their direct observation of nature, rather than the authority of the master-artists before them. Ironically, their students and anyone who aspired to become a great artist of the bella maniera, or this high bar of mathematical perfection of the High Renaissance in perspective as well as proportion, abandoned their own direct observation of nature and returned to copying and refining the lessons of the masters who came before them. Originality and innovation grew from the artists’ imagination, rather than the direct study and transcription of nature. The style of artists who broke away from the faithful replication of the canon of proportions and perspective laid out in the Early and High Renaissance was described as ammanierato, or “unmannered,” as it adopted distortions and outright breaks with all of the “rules” of art, both those from Classical antiquity as well as those pioneered and adopted by their predecessors in Florence and elsewhere.